Abstract
In recent years, a programme for young children called Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) has risen to simultaneous popularity and controversy. This article, written collaboratively by an education scholar and a drag queen involved in organizing DQSH, contextualizes the programme within the landscape of gender in education as well as within the world of drag, and argues that Drag Queen Story Hour provides a generative extension of queer pedagogy into the world of early childhood education. Drawing on the work of José Esteban Muñoz, the authors discuss five interrelated elements of DQSH that offer early childhood educators a way into a sense of queer imagination: play as praxis, aesthetic transformation, strategic defiance, destigmatization of shame, and embodied kinship. Ultimately, the authors propose that "drag pedagogy" provides a performative approach to queer pedagogy that is not simply about LGBT lives, but
living queerly.
Drag queens have historically been relegated to the realm of the night. In the past few years, however, drag performers have made their way from the dimly lit bars of gayborhoods and into the fluorescent lights of libraries and classrooms. Drag superstar Nina West released a children's music album entitled
Drag Is Magic in 2019, and multiple children's books about drag were published in 2020 (Bussell,
Citation2020). These efforts build upon the foundational work of many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth organizations, like San Francisco's Queens of the Castro, which has explored drag with high-school students for the last decade (Hsu,
Citation2016). In this article, we explore the pedagogical contributions of a programme called Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) as a form of queer imagining in an early childhood context. Through this programme, drag artists have channelled their penchant for playfully "'reading' each other to filth"
Footnote1 into different forms of literacy, promoting storytelling as integral to queer and trans communities, as well as positioning queer and trans cultural forms as valuable components of early childhood education. We are guided by the following question:
what might Drag Queen Story Hour offer educators as a way of bringing queer ways of knowing and being into the education of young children?
The emergence of DQSH coincides with a heightened visibility of LGBT people in general and drag performance in particular, intensifying critical questions about the commodification of queer cultures around the world. For example, the commercial success of the television show
RuPaul's Drag Race has raised the international profile of drag, drawing what seems to be an increasingly mainstream audience. Still, visibly queer space is increasingly hard to find, and queer and trans communities face dangerous realities. Gay bars all over the United States are closing their doors as historically queer neighbourhoods gentrify and community-building increasingly moves online
Footnote2 (Ghaziani,
Citation2015; Morgan,
Citation2019). Despite the dominant portrayal of issues like marriage and military inclusion as the principal goals of the LGBT civil rights movement, queer and trans activists are working to draw public attention to queer poverty, violence against queer/trans people of colour, and anti-LGBT governmental policies (e.g. Duberman,
Citation2018; Ferguson,
Citation2018; Villarreal,
Citation2018). Within this complex political landscape, DQSH seems to uniquely thread the needle between queer activism and broad cultural acceptance. That is, DQSH creates spaces for young children and families to immerse themselves in LGBT-themed stories, and does so in ways that seem to genuinely reflect queer ways of being and relating – rather than as a neatly marketed product. We believe that this makes DQSH worthy of closer study. We argue that the programme creates a pathway into the imaginative, messy, and rule-breaking aspects of drag for children without necessarily watering down queer cultures.
DQSH grew from queer author Michelle Tea's personal desire to connect her toddler with queer culture. As the outgoing Executive Director of the San Francisco literary non-profit RADAR Productions, Tea conceived of the programme in 2015, which was launched under the leadership of incoming Executive Director Juli Delgado Lopera and Managing Director Virgie Tovar. Soon after, DQSH was replicated by established organizations and in DIY-style events around the world. Most have taken place in libraries, schools, bookstores, and other community spaces. Readings have happened in dozens of locales, from major cities like New York, Mexico City, and Tokyo, to smaller ones like Cleveland, TN and San Marcos, TX (Drag Queen Story Hour, n.d.-b). Many coordinate under an incorporated non-profit organization, though others operate independently.
Like most drag performance, there is no consistent formula for DQSH. Yet, there are similarities across events (see
Figure 1). Most feature one to three drag performers. The overwhelming majority are drag queens, but there are occasional kings or other gender-bending performers. DQSH performers read a handful of children's books and lead children in movement and craft-based activities like making wands or tiaras. Book selections often include queer and/or trans characters, gender-transgressive themes, or narratives about not fitting in and finding one's voice. Some translate drag's penchant for taboo to kids' ideas of silly topics, like making a mess or potty time (Brooklyn Public Library, n.d.). Occasionally, a queen performs a lip-sync of songs from a children's film. At many events, organizers invite kids to create their own drag name or study feminist icons using DQSH's self-published
Dragtivity Book (Erlich,
Citation2018). A few cities have expanded programming to include bilingual readings, events geared specifically towards neurodivergent children and others with disabilities, or programmes for teenagers that feature makeup and performance workshops.
DQSH events have received widespread media coverage and been sponsored by a variety of institutions (Lamarche,
Citation2017; McCormick,
Citation2017), but the programme has not been without controversy. A few city councils have condemned the use of public space for story hours. Librarians and queens have received death threats. Drag performers associated with DQSH have been mocked and condemned in popular conservative media. Several story hours have been cancelled due to credible threats of violence. In a few cases, armed protestors have shown up to libraries (Owen,
Citation2019; Stack,
Citation2019). Many of these protests have been instigated by a small group of far-right conservative organizations and media personalities eager to position DQSH as the new face of longstanding culture wars, echoing tired homo- and transphobic talking points (Goldberg,
Citation2019; Nwanevu,
Citation2019; Segal,
Citation2019). This backlash gestures towards the fraught nature of connecting kids to overtly queer content, particularly in politically conservative regions. Still, DQSH receives overwhelmingly positive feedback and struggles to keep up with the demand for its programmes.
We take the public interest in DQSH as a starting point to highlight the generative pedagogical work that drag may offer to children. Many elements of DQSH are common to early childhood schooling: bright colours, music, art, and imaginative play. There is an adult teacher leading a classroom of young students. What is different, though, is that the teacher is a drag queen. She breaks the limiting stereotype of a teacher: she is loud, extravagant, and playful. She encourages children to think for themselves and even to break the rules. She is the exponential product of Ms. Frizzle and Bob the Drag Queen. She is a
queer teacher. To the unimaginative adult (which –
sigh – describes most of us), it might seem that the world of drag and the world of children are impossibly distant from one another. Yet, their meeting has left many audiences wondering why they hadn't considered it before. DQSH co-founder Juli Delgado Lopera notes this overlooked affinity in an interview: "I think generally queers are not mixed with kids—especially drag queens… It's a kid's world to be very imaginative" (Graff,
Citation2016). Co-founder Michelle Tea also comments, "they're both very funny and see the humor in the world… [and] for drag queens the idea is about pushing limits and pushing boundaries" (Rudi,
Citation2018). Such generalizations may not always apply, but these comments lead us to ask: What if we took play, defiance, and imagination seriously as forms of knowledge production? If we celebrated the convergence of children and drag queens, what kinds of potentialities might their collaboration hold?
We write this article from the standpoint of an education scholar and former elementary educator (Harper Keenan) and a doctoral student in media studies who is a DQSH queen and organizer (Lil Miss Hot Mess). Given these positions, we make no effort to hide our bias: we are both supporters of this programme, and Lil Miss Hot Mess is involved in its leadership. Our purpose, then, is to make use of our unique positions as scholar-practitioners to highlight the pedagogical elements of DQSH that may not be immediately obvious to its audiences. Combined with our experiential knowledge of working with children and living in queer/trans communities where drag is often a celebrated tradition, we incorporate theories drawn from the academic fields of education, performance, and queer and trans studies to consider how drag queens and children might work together, however fleetingly, to promote a spirit of creative inquiry and world making.
We propose that DQSH offers a particular kind of queer framework – what we call
drag pedagogy – for teaching and learning that extends beyond traditional approaches to LGBT curricular inclusion. The themes within drag pedagogy, applicable beyond the context of drag itself, move away from vocabulary lessons and the token inclusion of LGBT heroes to begin to engage deeper understandings of queer cultures and envision new modes of being together. We emphasize that drag pedagogy resists didactic instruction and is not prescriptive. Instead, it artfully invites children into building communities that are more hospitable to queer knowledge and experience.
Before we sashay into the world of drag queens and children, let's get a few things clear (or, queer). Firstly, "drag" is sometimes erroneously conflated with "trans." As a genderqueer drag performer/scholar and a trans scholar, we are acutely aware (and tired) of this problem. It happens in both conservative and liberal discourses. This conflation has led to occasional tensions even within queer and trans communities. Thus, we wish to be explicit: these terms are not synonymous. However, "drag" and "trans" overlap given that some drag artists are trans. While drag generally refers to a kind of consciously artistic performance intended for an audience, in contrast, trans people do not seek primarily to entertain. Yet, there is historical slippage between these two categories, especially as language has evolved over the past century. Many of the leaders most celebrated within the early trans movement described themselves as drag queens (and/or as "street queens" or "transvestites"), including Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson (Valentine,
Citation2007). One cannot meaningfully address trans history and struggle without engaging the history of drag. However, a full examination of those historical relationships is beyond the scope of this article. For our purposes, suffice it to say that the practice of drag and otherwise re-fashioning gender long predate the current terminology used to describe human experience. We expect that readers can make sense of this complicated terrain. After all, as might be said at a drag show, this is not amateur night. So, bring your notes and put on those glasses, everybody, because this requires reading on multiple levels.
In what follows, we begin by addressing legacies of schooling and its role in teaching children about gender norms and other aspects of personhood. We offer a brief background on drag, analysing it not only in terms of its gender disruptions, but also its own vernacular pedagogies and community engagement. In the second half of the article, we describe the kinds of knowledge that drag pedagogy can share with children (of all ages). We focus on five interrelated themes: play as praxis, aesthetic transformation, strategic defiance, camp and its relationship to stigma, and embodied kinship. Ultimately, we suggest that drag pedagogy offers one model for learning not simply about queer lives, but how to
live queerly. And we're living for it.
Schooling Children, Scripting Childhood
The institution of public schooling was founded, in part, as a way of maintaining nation-states. Thus, the professional vision (Goodwin,
Citation1994) of educators is often shaped to reproduce the state's normative vision of its ideal citizenry. In effect, schooling functions as a way to
straighten the child into a kind of captive alignment with the current parameters of that vision. Put differently, the design of schooling often serves as a kind of trellis that trains children away from social divergence in order to "grow up" to become adults who are viewed as socially and economically productive. In contrast, Kathryn Bond Stockton (
Citation2009) suggests a metaphor of queer "sideways growth" that is possible for all children (regardless of gender or sexuality). This framework, which counters dominant thinking about child development, is not directed towards a predetermined endpoint of growing up, but rather functions as an irregularized broadening of children's own interests, abilities, and eccentricities on their own terms.
Here, it is important to differentiate between "queer" as an identity that individuals claim for themselves and "queer" as an analytic. Many people, including both authors, use the word queer to describe ourselves. Although queerness refuses crystallized meaning, our use of the term in this article generally refers to our desire to practice an embodied political resistance to confining constructs of gender and sexuality as they are produced by the institutions and social relations that govern our lives. As an analytic frame, however, "queer" is not limited to the individual person. Queer theory can be used to examine how often-impossible standards of normalcy are formed, not only through institutional categorizations of gender and sexuality, but also through social expectations produced through the racialized structures of capitalism that are inextricably intertwined with that hierarchy (Cohen,
Citation1997; Ferguson,
Citation2004,
Citation2018; Muñoz,
Citation2009; Robinson,
Citation1983; Snorton,
Citation2017; Spade,
Citation2011).
Building in part from queer theory and trans studies, queer and trans pedagogies seek to actively destabilize the normative function of schooling through transformative education (Adair,
Citation2015; Britzman,
Citation1995; Bryson & de Castell,
Citation1993; Galarte,
Citation2015; Keenan,
Citation2017b; Kumashiro,
Citation2002; Malatino,
Citation2015; Muñoz & Garrison,
Citation2008; Pinar,
Citation1998; Platero & Drager,
Citation2015; Shlasko,
Citation2005). This is a fundamentally different orientation than movements towards the inclusion or assimilation of LGBT people into the existing structures of school and society. As a practical example in the early childhood classroom, consider the common practice of sorting children into groups of boys and girls. An inclusion stance might allow children to decide for themselves whether they would like to be in a boy's or a girl's group, whereas a transformative approach might work with children to inquire as to how "boy-ness" and "girl-ness" are given meaning, the limits of these two categories, and how people might organize themselves differently.
Throughout history and into the present, tremendous effort has been devoted to managing how children understand and embody gender (Gill-Peterson,
Citation2018; Sedgwick,
Citation1991). From their inception, institutions within the modern nation-state – the medical clinic, the courthouse, the asylum, the prison, and the school among them – have established and policed the borders of gender (Foucault,
Citation1977). Here, we emphasize that within the realities of our lives, gender never exists in isolation. Instead, the sets of lines drawn across living minds and bodies intersect with the countless lines drawn across the living world by centuries of global imperialism and colonialism enabled by ideologies of white supremacy (Bhattacharyya,
Citation2018; Combahee River Collective, 1977/
Citation2017; Crenshaw,
Citation1991; Davis,
Citation1983; Spillers,
Citation1987). To state it plainly, within the historical context of the USA and Western Europe, the institutional management of gender has been used as a way of maintaining racist and capitalist modes of (re)production. Trans studies scholar Jules Gill-Peterson (
Citation2015) argued that, within this context, childhood is positioned as a form of "futures trading" wherein categories of human-sorting (e.g. race, class, gender, sexuality) play the role of "economic coefficients" that produce material consequences for the trajectory of children's lives (p. 185).
Although individuals' experiences are profoundly complex, schooling often categorizes people in ways that train each of our ways of being into compliance with an inflexible "script" (Keenan,
Citation2017b). That script, which is enforced through formal institutions as well as through social interaction, operates on multiple levels. The script of gender teaches the public not only what gender
is in some essential sense – setting up a binary between womanhood and manhood – but that some gendered ways of being are acceptable and others are not. In the USA, for example, many people learn that the most valued boy will be white, engage in rough-and-tumble play with other boys that will toughen him up and straighten him out, allowing him to mature into a man who wears a suit and tie, makes a lot of money, enters into a sexually monogamous marriage with a woman, buys a home, and has enough but not too many children. In other words, a script that may begin with gender shapes how individuals are taught to understand their expected roles in society in ways that extend far beyond gender alone.
Almost no one can fully conform to the script of gender all of the time. Despite their efforts, public institutions and other producers of gendered borders cannot comprehensively account for the complexity of human existence. Yet, it is also virtually impossible to completely go off-script. Trans and gender non-conforming people, particularly those who are multiply-marginalized, are, with disturbing frequency, violently scapegoated for breaking gender's rules (and revealing the limits of those rules). However, the failures of a normative system of gender extend far beyond only those who self-identify as queer, trans, or otherwise beyond the narrow comprehension of the law (Spade,
Citation2011). The harmful impacts of institutionalized gender normativity reverberate across the living world. Generations of feminist, queer, and trans scholarship within and across the fields of Black and Indigenous studies, queer/trans of colour critique, and disability studies illustrate how gender normativity works to maintain the larger structures that facilitate its production – coloniality and racial capitalism central among them (Arvin et al.,
Citation2013; Clare,
Citation2017; Combahee River Collective, 1977/2017; Crenshaw,
Citation1991; Davis,
Citation1983; Ferguson,
Citation2004; Gill-Peterson,
Citation2015,
Citation2018; McRuer,
Citation2006; Muñoz,
Citation2009; Snorton,
Citation2017).
Schooling plays a central role in shaping how the public learns the behaviours considered necessary for survival. At the same time as each of us learn gendered scripts, we also learn about the consequences of diverting from them. What happens when you don't learn the lines of your assigned script? What if you decide to improv? What if it's just not
possible for you to adhere to a script you didn't write? Simply put, you are punished. Within and beyond schools, gender transgression is policed early in life, taking a range of forms that include social ostracism, psycho-medical pathologization, the denial of access to life-preserving resources, physical violence, or even death. The stakes are high, and they are often unpredictable. The spectacle of these kinds of punishment, in turn, incentivizes conformity with a normative gender script.
A closer look at knowledge production within queer and trans communities is necessary for considering educational tactics that might open possibilities towards a less violent society. Many efforts aimed at LGBT inclusion have replaced one monolithic script of gender with another, rather than engaging with how queer and trans knowledge production may invite us to re-examine the very foundations of
how we teach. In their refusal to comply with the dominant paradigm, queer and trans communities reach toward a different kind of world. José Esteban Muñoz argued in his 2009 book
Cruising Utopia that queerness is imagination itself, a yearning for a future not fully conceivable in the present:
Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. (p. 1)
We turn now to an exploration of drag as pedagogical form embodying the kind of queer imaginative ideality Muñoz described.
Drag Pedagogy and Cultural Production
An understanding of the pedagogical work of drag requires engaging with the social meaning of this art form and the kinds of educational and cultural work that it does. We understand drag not merely as gender reversal, but through the expansive description provided by both gay liberation activist Tede Matthews and contemporary drag superstar RuPaul (
Citation2014): "we're all born naked and the rest is drag."
Footnote3 This simple but profound statement suggests that no performance of gender or other cultural signifiers is ever natural (Butler,
Citation1990), whether on stage or in everyday life, and that drag serves as an intentional way of rewriting these scripts. Indeed, in queer slang, "drag" has long been used to describe any form of sartorially stylized performance, from putting on Sunday "church drag" to, in our cases, "librarian" and "teacher drag" (Keenan,
Citation2017a; Newton,
Citation1979). Gender fluidity is a key component of drag. Rather than thinking in binary terms, however, we position drag as a highly stylized series of twists and turns, ranging from the satirical to the sincere. Drag differs from other forms of gendered performance in its tendency to "mock authority and challenge the status quo" (Baker,
Citation1994, p. 18), poking fun at stereotypes rather than affirming them (Butler,
Citation1993; Garber,
Citation1997; Muñoz,
Citation1999). Of course, while drag may be implicitly transgressive, it is not inherently anti-oppressive.
Footnote4 Like any art form, drag's possibilities are limited by the views and actions of its practitioners.
It is important to note that drag pedagogy predates DQSH: drag has always included its own practices of teaching and learning. Drag's pedagogical and cultural work extends beyond entertainment to offer artistic interpretations of cultural texts, as well as opportunities for building and sustaining community. Performances generally address queer/trans people directly, through techniques like invoking community slang or making parodies out of pop songs. Drag often catalyses what Muñoz (
Citation1999) described as
disidentification, a mode of negotiating dominant culture that "simultaneously works on, with, and against, a cultural form" (p. 12) as a way for minoritized subjects to "seize social agency" (p. 1) in the public sphere. Building from Muñoz, E. Patrick Johnson (
Citation2001) wrote,
[T]hese disidentificatory performances serve material ends, and they do this work by accounting for the context in which these performances occur. The stage, for instance, is not confined solely to the theater, the dance club, or the concert hall. Streets, social service lines, picket lines, loan offices, and emergency rooms, among others, may also serve as useful staging grounds. (p. 13)
Indeed, drag performers have made important contributions to social and political change. A quick stroll through drag herstory reveals numerous examples: leadership in political uprisings like those at Compton's Cafeteria (1966) and the Stonewall Inn (1969) that shaped early gay liberation movements
Footnote5 (Silverman & Stryker,
Citation2005); performers like José Sarria and Joan Jett Blakk running for public office; and groups like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence raising funds for HIV/AIDS services and LGBT organizations. Each of these is a pedagogical act in queer own right.
In addition to teaching the public, drag performers have well-established ways of learning from each other and their audiences. Many performers study their craft in an adoptive drag family, wherein drag mothers (or fathers, sisters, aunties) guide their children in anything from how to glue down one's eyebrows to delivering a flawless lip-sync. Through interaction with audiences and observing fellow performers, drag artists learn about what fans appreciate and hecklers cling on to. Slang like "reading" and "shade" denote various forms of sassy but generally supportive critique, and play a pedagogical role among tight circles in clubs. Increasingly, many artists learn from social media tutorials or television shows. Though there are common standards or trends within the art of drag, there are few tightly held maxims or scripts.
Reading (to) the Children: Drag in the Classroom
We now turn to five overlapping examples of the kinds of cultural knowledge that drag can teach children and educators. We recognize that "culture" is an imprecise term, yet find some value in the cognitive struggle conjured by its ambiguity, similar to the word "queer." This list is also hardly exhaustive. We seek to move beyond assumptions that the purpose of a programme like DQSH should be only to expose children to "diverse" stories or easily digestible morsels of LGBT history and culture. Though DQSH publicly positions its impact in "help[ing] children develop empathy, learn about gender diversity and difference, and tap into their own creativity" (Drag Queen Story Hour, n.d.-a), we argue that its contributions can run deeper than morals and role models. In what follows, we keep with a common drag performance trope in redirecting our readers away from what's said on the surface and towards the subtle nods and zingers that gesture at what is happening between the lines. For us, drag pedagogy is less about imitating drag queens' specific behaviours, and more about embodied inquiry into queer/trans ways of being that reach beyond the present (see
Figure 2).
Feeling Your Fantasy: Play as Queer Praxis
Though hardly uncontroversial in either domain, play remains a critical component of both drag and early childhood education. Like other forms of make-believe, drag functions as a uniquely queer form of embodied and unscripted play that invites creative world-building. In this way, drag aligns with many early theories of play. Johan Huizinga (
Citation1949) described play as "a free activity standing quite consciously outside 'ordinary' life as being 'not serious,' but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly" (p. 13). What is drag if not dressing up in special costumes and acting out a fantasy outside of everyday life? Play is also framed as inherently un-productive, or as Roger Caillois (1958/2001) stated, "an occasion of pure waste" (p. 5). We suggest that drag's larger value lies largely outside of formal economies. Instead, our understanding of play is rooted in a spirit of amusement without a productive outcome. While drag has some conventions, it ultimately has no rules – its defining quality is often to break as many rules as possible! Thus, drag can be thought of as a kind of queer praxis that may be especially well-suited to early childhood education, not because of any qualities essential to young children, and instead because early education is one of the few remaining school settings that encourages play.
Drag similarly breaks boundaries between reality and fantasy in allowing performers to take on new identities and social relationships in material form, just by playing the part. Huizinga referred to the etymology of imagination as "making an image of something different, something more beautiful, or more sublime" (p. 13). The concept of "realness," vernacular popularized in Black and Latinx queer/trans ballroom communities, articulates a similar sense of becoming-through-performance. Ballroom performers don outfits to compete in categories like "femme queen," "school boy," or "executive realness" (Bailey,
Citation2013; Butler,
Citation1993). As noted in the documentary
Paris is Burning (Livingston,
Citation1990): "Whatever you want to be, you be… you have a chance to display your elegance, your seductiveness, your beauty, your wit, your charm, your knowledge. You can become anything and do anything right here, right now and it won't be questioned." Drag reminds us that our imaginations need not be limited by embodiment, but that we can all make over our own image to shape how others see us.
As it moves into early childhood education settings, the art of drag risks falling into the trap of what Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández (
Citation2013) calls the "rhetoric of effects." The incorporation of play and art in the classroom is regularly justified by this category of instrumentalist claims, including their potential to bolster "academic skill development" through measurable outcomes. In effect, this framework can turn play into a "technology of governmentality in early childhood" (Ailwood,
Citation2003, p. 292). As an organization, DQSH may be incentivized to recite lines about alignment with curricular standards and social–emotional learning in order to be legible within public education and philanthropic institutions. Drag itself ultimately does not take these utilitarian aims too seriously (but it is quite good at looking the part when necessary). Instead, drag is firmly rooted in play as a site of queer pleasure, resistance, and self-fashioning. It aims towards play without predetermined purpose.
Serving Looks: Teaching through Aesthetic Transformation
DQSH is pedagogical without being particularly pedantic. There are few neat-and-tidy lessons, no repetitively stated objectives, no scripted curriculum aside from the text of the books read aloud. Instead, the programme is based largely on improvised performance and the appeal of aesthetics (see
Figure 3). Building from Muñoz (
Citation2009), we suggest that the aesthetic dimension of drag pedagogy engages with
potentiality (that which does not exist in present material form, but "on the horizon") rather than
possibility (that which already exists in a tangible and real way) (p. 99).
While there is a loose and practically oriented common architecture to a story hour (read a story, sing a song, rinse, and repeat), the queens do very little to teach anything explicitly. There is no lesson on the meaning of gender, no worksheets on how to be kind – all that is blasé. Such activities would betray integrity to form. Instead, the queens employ a more dialogic approach to pedagogy that is largely built on a captivating aesthetic that seeks to broaden the imagination. The educational philosopher Maxine Greene (
Citation1995), deeply concerned with "wide-awakeness, of awareness of what it is to be in the world," wrote:
[T]o tap into imagination is to become able to break with what is supposedly fixed and finished, objectively and independently real. It is to see beyond what the imaginer has called normal or "common sensible" and to carve out new orders in experience. Doing so, a person may become freed to glimpse what might be, to form notions of what should be and what is not yet. And the same person may, at the same time, remain in touch with what presumably
is. (p. 19)
Or, as drag queen Nina West (
Citation2019) sang in her children's album, "
Drag is a vacation from a boring day/Use your own imagination/All you gotta do is close your eyes and see who you wanna be." In the world of drag, you can wear a crown
and glitter
and bright yellow crinoline
and makeup
and neon green fishnets
and a wig. Everything is dialled up, made more interesting in large part because it is
extraordinary. The same book read by a "regular" teacher suddenly seems banal – when a drag queen reads a story, the technicolour has been turned on and the show has begun.
Though there are many layers to drag, its most-immediate process of denaturalizing gender and culture happens on the surface, through the potentiality held in aesthetics. As early childhood educational philosophies like Reggio Emilia have espoused for generations, visual aesthetics can act as a "third teacher" in a classroom, playing an equal role to the adults and children in the learning process. In the Reggio Emilia tradition, materials often provide creative provocations to inspire inquiry and learning (Edwards et al.,
Citation1998; Strong-Wilson & Ellis,
Citation2007). It is worth noting here that the Reggio Emilia philosophy developed in connection with the Italian anti-fascist movement in the mid-20th century, demanding a particular political urgency for the cultivation of imagination in children (Cagliari et al.,
Citation2016).
Within the context of DQSH, the visual style of the queen serves as a provocation that invites inquiry into normative fashion and embodiment. Glitter, sequins, wigs, and heels all serve as pedagogical tools, inviting questions like
why and how is drag made unusual in this environment? In other words, while verbal communication is a crucial element of DQSH, even if the queen said nothing, we argue that her mere aesthetic presence would be generative. While simultaneously destabilizing many of the mundane assumptions of gendered embodiment and of classroom life through the style, movement, and gesture, DQSH presents a queer relationship to educational experience. The traditional role of the teacher, transformed into a loud and sparkling queen, becomes delightfully excessive. She is less interested in focus, discipline, achievement, or objectives than playful self-expression. Her pedagogy is rooted in pleasure and creativity borne, in part, from letting go of control.
Reading the Room: Inviting Strategic Defiance
DQSH is organized differently than the usual classroom experience. The art of drag is defiant, playful, unruly. Drag is largely improvisational and relies on a performer's practiced adaptation to an audience. There is an art to knowing when to wing it, to take a break from being a control queen, or to make room for a bit of chaos. Words or dance steps get forgotten, a song skips, a prop breaks – and audiences often talk back. Drag queens have little interest in such mechanical and dull ideas as "classroom management." Classroom management, as a framework, relies on rules and procedures as a sort of factory model for quality control (Shalaby,
Citation2017). It stifles creativity and aims towards order, marching towards a mirage of identical outcomes and efficient productivity. This reinforces what Foucault (
Citation1977) called the "carceral continuum," which disproportionately funnels minoritized students towards prisons and other forms of confinement (Annamma et al.,
Citation2014; Love,
Citation2016; Meiners,
Citation2010).
As an art form, drag is all about bending and breaking the rules, and so its aims are totally different from a normative classroom. When a drag queen enters a (class)room, she generally intends to draw attention to herself – whether through shock, admiration, or envy of her embodied performance. There is a premium on standing out, on artfully desecrating the sacred. In other words, what we refer to as
strategic defiance is encouraged. What might strategic defiance look like in a classroom setting? How might teachers encourage children to talk back, rather than suppressing dissent? Arts education scholar Elliot Eisner (
Citation2002) wrote, "in the arts, judgements are made in the absence of rule" (p. 77). How can educators teach children how to skillfully question authority or break the rules?
Drag may offer some insights into how educators might support a practice of strategic defiance. In the moments when a child interrupts, a queen might respond to them as she would a heckler at a show. Rather than punishing a child by reprimanding or removing them, a queen is more likely to try to engage the child's energy and use it to fuel her performance. As drag artist Taylor Mac insists, when an audience member "is threatening to take the story away from the storyteller, then you have to incorporate [them] into the story, at all costs" (Greenwell,
Citation2018). That's why the best queens engage their hecklers, turning the butt of the joke around, or better yet, forming a sense of solidarity between the performer and heckler against the outside world. Many young students, like hecklers, interrupt or "act out" because they are genuinely curious and excited, don't fully understand something, or feel excluded and are looking for a way to participate. By playfully responding to and incorporating children's feedback rather than dismissing it, teachers might invite their students into co-constructing the classroom environment.
In a broader context, fostering collective unruliness also helps children to understand that they can have a hand in changing their environment. For any child who has ever asked a parent or teacher "why?" and been unsatisfied with the answer, "because I told you so," drag may help elucidate the arbitrariness of rules. By encouraging students to explore the boundaries of acceptability, drag offers a model for participating in a learning experience where axioms are meant to be challenged and authority is not a given. In the school environment, of course, oppressive conditions are often produced by the institution itself, and many children who intuitively resist these conditions are punished.
DQSH performers demonstrate a refusal to be told what to do. In their demonstration of strategic defiance, drag storytellers engage in a more finely tuned kind of resistance that many children practice all the time. This embodied pedagogy teaches that, in unjust situations, people can use strategic tactics to push back against harmful actions. Drag may be especially well-positioned as a form of cultural production that, to paraphrase the writer and filmmaker Toni Cade Bambara, serves to "make revolution irresistible" (as cited in Bonetti,
Citation1982).
Similarly, drag aesthetics can provide an avenue into exploring children's curiosities about social norms, which often reflect inconsistencies in what they have been taught. At many DQSH events, children ask genuine questions like "are you a boy or a girl?" or "why are you dressed like that?" often embarrassing their well-meaning parents or teachers. Although such questions can be hurtful in many non-drag contexts, DQSH creates a space in which performers can answer personally and honestly. In many cases, drag queens may not respond with answers, but with questions meant to complicate perceptions of gender and society: "why does it matter if I'm a boy or a girl?" or "why
shouldn't I wear sequins and feathers and lots of makeup?"
Drag loves to turn rejection into desire, transforming the labour of performance into the pleasure of participation. Typically, as an audience member, you don't pay attention because you have to; you pay attention because you
want to. Here, DQSH reaches towards what educational philosopher Michalinos Zembylas (
Citation2007) referred to as a
pedagogy of desire. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari (
Citation1987), Zembylas theorized such a pedagogy as one that "draws attention to the social and political construction of desire and transforms the valorization of essential (basic) knowledge and skills into a site of political analysis" (p. 344). In so doing, pedagogies of desire "strive to create
landscapes of becoming," engaging with the risks and pleasures of modifying and being modified by the world (p. 345). The aesthetics of drag offer a landscape of becoming through a vision of self-determination and freedom within a collective: you can do what you want to do, you can be who you want to be, in a practice that takes place in constant conversation with others.
Camping It Up: Embracing Shame as Curriculum
DQSH embraces a kind of camp curriculum. Here, we think of curriculum as an active process that seeks to (re)open potentialities outside of what children have come to expect about society. Camp, like drag, cannot be defined or explicitly taught. In Susan Sontag's (1964/1999) formative essay, she refers to camp as a "sensibility" that relies on unapologetic artifice, in the treatment of life as theatre by "dethron[ing] the serious" through the "proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve" (p. 536, 259). Camp is not simply a gimmick, as Christopher Isherwood makes explicit: "You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance" (cited in Baker,
Citation1994, p. 238). Camp thus allows a performer to survive oppressive conditions and address otherwise painful subjects by decontextualizing and defanging them (Dyer,
Citation2005; McMillan,
Citation2014).
As a performative practice, camp – and, by extension, drag – seeks to embrace failure and shame, ideas whose substance may look different for children, but still provoke highly affective reactions. In the context of DQSH, campily addressing these topics may involve reading books like Taro Gomi's (1977/1993)
Everyone Poops that may feel a bit scandalous or taboo to children (or the adults who accompany them), fostering a spirit of irreverence and impropriety in the classroom. Choosing to read a story like
Everyone Poops makes fun out of a book that would make many teachers nervous: it's true, everybody does poop, and the people who perhaps most regularly remind society of that are young children. In preschool, when many children are recently toilet-trained, a source of pride is quickly made into something shameful at school –
poop is private and not to be discussed here. DQSH dethrones the serious by taking toilet humour out of the bathroom and into public space, aligning with a common childhood experience by laughing
with them at a stigmatized topic, thereby challenging the implicit rules of school.
Similarly, many campy drag aesthetics like parody and exaggeration destigmatize shame by placing the joke on society, rather than individuals, further revealing to kids that ideas of appropriateness are subject to change. For example, Lil Miss Hot Mess's (
Citation2020) picture book
The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish encourages kids to move their hips in ways often coded as effeminate. This not only breaks the taboo of acting effeminate or identifying with queer figures, but also opens space for children to study drag as a source of creative inspiration. Classroom teachers might similarly work to address children's feelings of shame by highlighting the arbitrariness of norms, treating the disconnect between individual experience and institutional expectation as an important site of knowledge production to guide change.
Further, drag and camp both embody culturally specific forms of critical pedagogy. Far from reflecting a superficial "style over substance," camp requires deep engagement with its material. As Philip Core (
Citation1984) noted, camp is "the lie that tells the truth" (p. 105). That is, drag helps us better understand dominant culture by transforming its constitutive elements. In this way, camp echoes feminist standpoint theory (Haraway,
Citation1988), foregrounding interpretation from one's own cultural situation as well as broader social context. Thus, while drag incorporates elements of fantasy, it is meant to reveal rather than deceive: contrary to the prevalence of misinformation today, drag offers a playful call to consider information from many angles, question its motivations, and cite its sources with the wink of an eye (Kornstein,
Citation2019). In a camp-informed curriculum, students might develop media literacies not only through studying established canons, but also by parodying pop songs or rewriting their favourite books in order to imagine beyond the worlds they inhabit.
From Empathy to Embodied Kinship
Finally, it is often assumed that the primary pedagogical goal of queer education should be to increase empathy towards LGBT people. While this premise has some merit – and underlies many sincere projects in educational and cultural work, including DQSH – the notion of empathy has also been critiqued by feminist scholars of colour and others for the ways in which empathy can enable an affective appropriation of an individual's unique experiences and reinforce hierarchies of power. Scholars have invoked terms like "false empathy" (Pozo,
Citation2018), "identity tourism" (Nakamura,
Citation2002, p. 40), and empathy's "obliteration of the other" (Hartman,
Citation1997, p. 7) to critique the claims of "putting yourself in someone else's shoes" via various "empathy machines." Whether through literature or virtual reality, these tropes tend to reflect an overstated ability to understand difference, as well as empathy's potential to preclude meaningful relationships of solidarity.
It is undeniable that DQSH participates in many of these tropes of empathy, from the marketing language the programme uses to its selection of books. Much of this is strategically done in order to justify its educational value. However, we suggest that drag supports scholars' critiques of empathy, rather than reifying the concept: drag performers do not necessarily seek identification with an "other," but rather to experience ways of embodying and expressing different aspects of themselves. Rather than walking in someone else's shoes – and trying to understand what it might mean to
be a different gender, for example – drag offers a model for participants to try on many costumes and cosmetics to understand how these elements reinforce or alter their own sense of self.
Footnote6 In the classroom, this queer dress-up might create more opportunities for young people to experiment with the feeling of how and why seemingly arbitrary changes of clothing and behaviour impact the ways they experience and are interpreted by the world. That is, drag is an imaginative and creative process. It is grounded in building character, both in the sense of constructing a persona and in better understanding one's own relations to others. This approach can support students in finding the unique or queer aspects of themselves – rather than attempting to understand what it's like to be LGBT.
Drag pedagogy brings a sense of queerness more robustly into the classroom, not merely by teaching about Harvey Milk or Sylvia Rivera, but through an embodied and affective process. Cultural theorists have long described relationships of solidarity across difference, from Audre Lorde's foundational calls to learn from "each other's differences in our common battles for a livable future" (Lorde,
Citation1988, p. 78) to Harney and Moten (
Citation2013) more recent theorization of "study" as about simply "what you do with other people" that honours that "the incessant and the irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present" (Harney & Moten,
Citation2013, p. 20, 110). Rather than building empathy from a set of presumed straight or cisgender children, then, drag pedagogy might enact a mode of queer kinship that acknowledges that there is
already queerness within the classroom. In turn, drag queen teachers have much to learn from interactions with children: many queens reflect that DQSH allows them to build relationships with young people that otherwise would not be possible. Some queens who faced homo- and transphobic mistreatment as children have said that DQSH has offered a kind of healing and hope.
Queer theory has generally reflected pessimism about the future, and some queer theorists have rejected the compulsory reproductivity that children often represent in society (Edelman,
Citation2004). However, following Muñoz (
Citation2009), we suggest that DQSH offers a queer
relationality with children that breaks from the reproductive futurity of the normative classroom and nuclear family. As Muñoz wrote, "queerness should and could be about a desire for another way of being in both the world and time, a desire that resists mandates to accept that which is not enough" (p. 96). Similarly, Sara Ahmed (
Citation2019) writes about queer
use as ways of remaking existing paths and institutions, often by those who are not conceived as the intended users. In writing about how everyday experiences can serve as queer teachers, she notes that such work "requires more than an act of affirmation: it requires world dismantling effort" (p. 229). We offer that the kinship created by drag pedagogy might offer a way of thinking beyond both the cruel optimism (Berlant,
Citation2011) and potential utopias of the horizon, to consider how alternate worlds are being made in the here and now.
As drag has moved further into the mainstream, some have questioned whether this queer art form has lost its edge. In discussing the work of DQSH within our social circles, we have occasionally encountered critiques that DQSH is sanitizing the risqué nature of drag in order to make it "family friendly." We do not share this pessimistic view. Queer worldmaking, including political organizing, has long been a project driven by desire. It is, in part, enacted through art forms like fashion, theatre, and drag. We believe that DQSH offers an invitation towards deeper public engagement with queer cultural production, particularly for young children and their families. It may be that DQSH is "family friendly," in the sense that it is accessible and inviting to families with children, but it is less a sanitizing force than it is a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship. Here, DQSH is "family friendly" in the sense of "family" as an old-school queer code to identify and connect with other queers on the street.
We do, however, share the well-founded concern surrounding the profit-driven co-optation of queer social movements. We certainly understand why the mainstream public would be drawn to queer artistry – quite frankly, why wouldn't you be? It looks good, it's edgy, and it's a lot of fun. However, when public engagement with queer culture is shallow, it risks becoming exploitative. In this way, DQSH is caught in the crosshairs of capitalism. Drag queens are simultaneously among the most beloved and reviled members of queer communities, and their feminized labour has historically been exploited in service of entertainment. Of course, drag queens are also workers who need to make money – now – and DQSH provides a new avenue for income. As DQSH gains a wider public audience, there are the usual requests for resources that can be used to advance LGBT inclusion in schools. These requests beckon the production of boxed curricula, corporate-style inclusivity trainings, and lesson sequences that can be absorbed by school structures and budgets. Prefabricated replicable curricula may offer profitability, but performance art is not easily packaged. We ask: will DQSH succumb to pragmatism? Or, will it revel in its strategic defiance, its transformative power, its campy thrills, and its alternate kinship structures?
As we write this article, DQSH continues to draw public enthusiasm and is set to expand. Of course, we are excited about that. Yet, we also wonder how DQSH can continue to exist, in Muñoz's words, "on the horizon," engaging with the power of young children's imaginations today to begin to envision alternate tomorrows. Playing with drag can be a way to remember that, in the words of Harney and Moten (
Citation2013), "We're already here, moving" (p. 19). We're dressing up, we're shaking our hips, and we're finding our light – even in the fluorescents. We're reading books while we read each other's looks, and we're leaving a trail of glitter that won't ever come out of the carpet.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge the artistic and intellectual contributions of Drag Queen Story Hour's performers and organizers, with thanks for adding a bit of sparkle to our world. We thank Taica Hsu for bringing this work to new audiences and photographer Paolo Quadrini for generously allowing us to share his photographs.
Disclosure statement
Lil Miss Hot Mess is among the founding queens of Drag Queen Story Hour, and currently serves in its leadership.
Notes
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Harper Keenan
Harper B. Keenan is an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, where he currently serves as the Robert Quartermain Professor of Gender & Sexuality Research in Education. Broadly, his scholarship examines the role of schooling, curriculum, and pedagogy in teaching children about how society is organized. His work has appeared in the
Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, Gender and Education, and elsewhere.
Lil Miss Hot Mess
Lil Miss Hot Mess is a performer and board member for Drag Queen Story Hour, and the author of the children's book
The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish (Running Press Kids, 2020). She is also a PhD candidate in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she researches and teaches on digital media, surveillance, and media arts. Her writing has been published in
Surveillance & Society, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, The Guardian, Wired, and Salon, among others.
Notes
1 "Reading to filth" is a term that originated in the ballroom community (made up primarily of queer/trans people of color) that describes a biting but playful form of critique. For a longer discussion of "reading" in the context of Black humor, see: Monk-Payton (2017). It is also important to note that many ballroom participants do not identify as drag artists. Here, we acknowledge the phrase's deeply enmeshed and complicated integration into non-Black queer and drag spaces.
2 This pattern began before the coronavirus pandemic, but has been accelerated by it (Burns, 2020).
3 This line appears as such in RuPaul's song "Born Naked." In the 1977 queer documentary
Word Is Out, the self-described "genderfuck" activist Tede Matthews says: "We're all born naked, and anything anybody wears at any time is drag" (Adair et al., 1978).
4 We do not believe drag is categorically sexist or transphobic; however, we have both encountered performances that reflect these and other forms of oppression. RuPaul, arguably the world's most famous drag performer, is herself a controversial figure due to her racist and transphobic comments and actions (Blackmon, 2018). We offer this disclaimer not to write off drag completely, but as we consider the potentialities of what drag can be and do – particularly as it expands into new audiences through DQSH – we must also account for its own potential harmful ramifications.
5 As mentioned above, we recognize that many of the people involved in these demonstrations may now identify as transgender.
6 Additionally, while cultural appropriation is not unheard of in the drag world, in many ways it is discouraged. Drag tends to focus on experimenting with elements from one's own identities, such as a Jewish queen throwing herself a faux Bat Mitzvah or a Chicanx king satirizing lowrider-loving machismo. As a subcultural art form, drag also tends to "punch up" to comment on dominant forms of culture, such as Muñoz's (1999) description of Vaginal Davis's "terrorist drag" that excoriates white supremacist culture (p. 108).
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